Abelard and the Church’s Policy Towards the Jews

Summary

The First Crusade of 1096 represented a turning-point for the Jews inWestern Europe. Two French sources report that some Crusaders felt that it was wrong to travel overseas to fight against the Saracens and free the Holy Places, while the people who had murdered Christ, the Jews, were waiting on their doorstep at home. The pogroms spread from Rouen via Metz, Mainz,Worms, Speyer, Trier, Cologne and Boppard as far as Regensburg and Prague. The attacks were less the work of Crusaders than townspeople, either motivated by religious fanaticism or because the attackers owed the Jews money and saw the pogroms as a way of relieving themselves from this pressure. Nevertheless, the Jewish chronicler Salomon ben Simson regarded Geoffrey de Bouillon, the leader of the Crusade, as responsible for the attacks. In a letter to the Emperor Henry IV, who called him to account, Geoffrey denied this with the words that ‘he never had any intention of doing them any harm’. Many Jews found refuge with the local authorities, whether the aristocracy or Church.

When it comes to the Second Crusade of 1146, whether dealing with pogroms from the point of view of the history of the Crusades or of medieval Jewry, historians have regarded the massacres which accompanied the Crusade as horrifying repeats, similarly motivated and directed, of those which accompanied the First Crusade. This is true of older narratives such as that byWaas and even of the new editions of classic works such as Patschowsky's edition of Liebeschütz. Prevailing opinion is that the emotions which accompanied the Crusade strengthened feelings against the Jews and led to a long term deterioration in their situation. As Liebeschütz wrote: ‘This was in spite of the fact that the church's doctrine on the status of the Jews had remained basically unchanged, even though the experience of the Crusade had been assimilated into its patterns of thought and teaching.’ The underlying idea that the people, goaded on by fanatics, were alone responsible for the massacres of the Jews during the Second Crusade, however, needs modification. I hope to show here that dramatic theological debates between 1130 and 1145, the time of the beginning of the Second Crusade, and an unfortunate involvement of the Jews in one of the major conflicts within the Church, the election of Pope Innocent II, meant a fateful polarisation of ecclesiastical policy against them.